Bitfinex Exchange Review

When it comes to daily trade volume, reputation and safety, Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange that is consistently ranked as one of the best.

While Bitfinex is certainly not an exchange that we would say is a good choice for beginners, moderate to advanced level traders would be foolish to ignore what it has to offer. Containing a wide variety of coins, trade pairs and trading options, Bitfinex really is an exchange that among the leaders in the sector.

Bitfinex was first launched back in 2012 and is owned by iFinex Inc. Since its launch, the Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange has grown to become of the largest around in terms of trading volumes and user activity.

With an average of $2B in trades performed across the platform each day, Bitfinex is easily among the busiest exchanges around. This trade volume can only be put down to the excellent platform they deliver, some very low transaction fees and a vast coin selection that not many others can compete with.

Throw in the ability to margin trade, the 72 market pairs available to take advantage of and the fact that fiat currencies can be used for deposits and you have yourself a very solid cryptocurrency exchange indeed.

If you are an experienced trader, you probably already know all about Bitfinex but if you have not tried it out yet, you really are missing out on what we feel to be one of the best cryptocurrency exchanges there is.

Find out more by reading the rest of this review and we are sure you will quickly agree with us.

Mobile Apps

Bitfinex is one of those cryptocurrency exchanges that has figured out the importance of creating a dedicated app version of their exchange. Not many have gone down this route but we firmly believe that an app can make a massive difference to those that like to check in on their investments and trades while out and about.

You can now do your trading, funding and transfers from your mobile device and even receive handy notifications on trade executions or when a price you were waiting for finally appears.

Users can also take advantage of some added security features that allow you to customize the app to have it use only the permissions that you want it to do. There is more on that here.

Notifications and alerts

Execute trades and funding from your device

Coins Offered

There are 72+ market pairs to be found on Bitfinex with each of them being linked with either US Dollar, the Euro, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Below is a list of the cryptocurrencies that can be traded ay Bitfinex:

Each of those currencies will have their own transaction fees associated with them – especially when it comes to withdrawals but we will speak more about that a little later on.

Trading Options

Another area where Bitfinex really stands out is the number of different trading options that it provides. Most of these should only be used by moderate to experienced traders as there is quite a lot to learn for beginners. However, Bitfinex has never claimed to be a suitable place for newbies and has always aimed itself at the more experienced users.

As well as providing leveraged margin trading, Bitfinex allows users to place the following trade orders:

Market Trading

Limit Trading

Stop Trading

Trailing Stop

Fill or Kill (FOK)

One Cancels Other (OCO)

Post-Only Limit Order

Hidden Order

As you can see, there are so many trade options that you can take advantage of at Bitfinex and this is why it is such a stand out exchange.

Registering at BitFinex

Creating an account at Bitfinex is not as straightforward as it is at other cryptocurrency exchanges.

It is important to note that Bitfinex has always admitted that they are only interested in more experienced traders and are not for beginners. This is stressed greatly even before you try to sign up for an account.

A pop-up box will tell you this straight away and will also inform new registrants that a minimum account equity of at least $10,000 USD is required before a user will be able to trade or use the platform in any meaningful way.

Furthermore, even if you do have access to that equity, if you were planning to deposit using the USD or EUR fiat currencies, you will have to undergo a lengthy verification process. This on average will take a good six to eight weeks to complete.

If you qualify in terms of experience are able to provide that minimum equity of $10,000, your next step will be creating your account. This part is the straightforward bit as you just provide your username, password, email address (which will need to be verified), time zone and the answer to a captcha.

Making a Deposit

Once your account has been created, the next thing you will need to do before you can start trading is to deposit into your new account.

Doing this involves first clicking the ‘deposit’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen. You are taken to a fresh screen where you choose the currency and how much of it you wish to deposit.

Once your deposit is in your account, you are then all set to take advantage of the excellent trading tools at your disposal at Bitfinex.

Just click on ‘trading’ and then decide which trade pair you would like to use. Then you can decide the quantity, price and the type of order that you would like to place.

Accepted Payment Methods

Credit cards are unfortunately not accepted for making payments on Bitfinex but there is the possibility of depositing and withdrawing fiat currencies (only USD or EUR) via wire transfer. The only other way to deposit or withdraw from Bitfinex is through using cryptocurrencies.

Thiose cryptocurrencies can be seen in the ‘coins offered section’ that you read earlier in this review.

USD

EUR

Cryptocurrencies

Transaction Fees

One of the reasons for the popularity of Bitfinex is the low fees that it charges its users. While there are some exchanges out there that are a little cheaper, when you consider the all-around package of Bitfinex, you are getting far better value for your money.

Deposit Fees

Depositing anything over the equivalent of $1,000 USD in cryptocurrencies on Bitfinex will be completely free of charge while anything under will see a small fee attached. As for using a bank wire to deposit fiat currencies, the fee is set at a minimum of $20 or 0.100%.

Withdrawal Fees

There are small fees attached to the withdrawal of most cryptocurrencies but some are free. To find out more information about the fees for each particular currency, these can be found out here. As for the wire transfer of fiat currencies, these are the same as the fees for deposits.

Trading Fees

Trading fees are calculated depending on the trade volume that a user has performed over the last 30 days. Maker fees start at a base of 0.100% but will become lower as soon as a user has managed a trading volume of more than $500k within the last 30 days. Taker fees, on the other hand, start at 0.200% and will not decrease until trade volume of $10 million or more has been seen throughout the last 30 days. More info can be found at their site.

Transfer Limits

Bitfinex has not listed any information on their site regarding any limits and even after scouring through their in-depth knowledge base, we were still unable to find anything official.

That being said, looking at posts on a number of different forums, it seems that many investors have never had any issues with limits. This would suggest that there are not transfer limits at all – which has to be good news.

As for processing times, deposits of cryptocurrencies are usually instant but withdrawals can sometimes take as long 12 hours. This is because each withdrawal is manually reviewed unless you have enabled two-factor authentication on your account.

Customer Support

At Bitfinex, the only way you can get in touch with their 24/7 customer service is via email. While they are normally quite responsive and will get back to you within the day or 12 hours at most, on extremely busy days they can be a lot slower.

If there was an area where this excellent exchange could improve, like many others, it is definitely their customer service. We feel a live chat feature and possibly telephone support would be a massive step in the right direction.

What we do like at Bitfinex however, is the excellent and in-depth knowledge base that they have created for their users. Many questions that you might need answering are all there and the information has all been presented in an easy to say and efficient manner.

Responsive email support

Informative knowledge base

Safety

Bitfinex is among the oldest exchanges on the market and although it has some excellent security measure in place, it has been the target of hackers on occasions. It has been hacked twice, first in 2015 and later in 2016.

The first was for a small amount that was quickly reimbursed by Bitfinex but the second was much greater – to the tune of $72 million worth of Bitcoin.

All investors lost out but for every $1 lost by an investor, a token was issued and Bitfinex made a promise to buy back each token as quickly as they could in order to reimburse their customers.

Bit by bit they bought these tokens from their customers and by April 2017, they had successfully bought all tokens and reimbursed their customers for every lost due to the attack.

While the hackings at the time showed up what must have been a lack of security, the manner in which they have responded to both has to be applauded. We are not sure many other exchanges would have responded in the same way by paying back their investors.

The hackings have also seen Bitfinex step up their security massively, with 99.5% of all client funds now being kept in offline cold storage. Furthermore, two-factor authentication and PGP email encryption are both used to help protect user accounts.

2FA

U2F

PGP Email Encryption

Conclusion

In our opinion, if you are an experienced trader, there is no better exchange to use than Bitfinex. Developed by experienced traders to be used by experienced traders, this is no place for beginners. There are plenty of other exchanges out there that will help to show you the ropes but that is not what Bitfinex is interested in doing.

That choice of direction has certainly been successful as Bitfinex is now recognized as the largest BTC exchange in terms of trade volume. Even a couple of hacking scandals has not stopped that momentum down to how they reacted to them and as a result, this exchange is one of the most trusted and reputable.

With a host of trading options, a large selection of supported coins, an excellent interface and some of the lowest fees around, we cannot rate Bitfinex highly enough.

Check it out today (if you can meet their minimum requirements to trade) and we are certain that you will be in agreement with us to the top-quality trading features that Bitfinex has to offer.